Wu Ji (engineer)

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Wu Ji ( Chinese  吳 季  /  吴 季 , Pinyin Wú Jì , born  April 19, 1958 in Beijing ) is a Chinese communications engineer. From December 31, 1994 to December 28, 2017, he was the director of the Center for Space Science and Applied Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (from July 7, 2011, “ National Center for Space Science ”). In 2016 he was voted one of ten science stars in China by the British magazine " Nature ".

Youth and Studies

Image of the Giotto space probe from Halley's Comet

Wu Ji's family comes from what was then Tongnan County , now a district of Chongqing in Sichuan . However, he himself was born on April 19, 1958 in Beijing. After graduation in 1977 he studied at the Faculty of Radio Technology (无线通信系) of the former Academy of Posts and Telecommunications Beijing (北京邮电学院, since 1993 University of Posts and Telecommunications Beijing ) radio . After completing his intermediate diploma, he specialized in the theory of electromagnetic fields and microwave technology and graduated as a graduate engineer in August 1980. Then he stayed at the Faculty of Radio Technology and worked there as a lecturer (讲师). Wu Ji taught antenna technology and the propagation of electric waves. He was therefore very interested in the ionosphere and would have liked to have carried out practical experiments in this area. In the 1960s, under Zhao Jiuzhang , then head of the Institute for Geophysics at the Academy of Sciences, China had already undertaken research into this with the sounding rockets of the T-7 family , but this had come to a standstill as a result of the Cultural Revolution . In October 1985, the United Nations Development Program, together with the European Space Agency, started a project in which scientists from the Third World were enabled, with financial support from UNDP, to work for one year at ESA facilities and to continue their education there. At that time, China was still considered a developing country, and after several selection rounds, Wu Ji was able to benefit from such a scholarship.

At ESA, Wu Ji was involved in the development work for antennas used on communications satellites. On the night of March 13-14, 1986, he saw the European space probe Giotto fly past Halley's comet , which transmitted ever sharper images of the celestial body in real time during the approach phase. He was deeply impressed, and when his internship came to an end, he decided to shift the focus of his work to space science. After his return to China, however, he and his old professor from the Academy of Post and Telecommunications first published a calculation method for the radiation of antennas on communications satellites, which was adopted by the Chinese Academy of Space Technology and used for the construction of the on November 30, 1994 launched satellite Dong Fang Hong 3 was used.

During his internship at ESA, Wu Ji also visited Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm GmbH and Denmark's Technical University . In October 1989 he returned to Denmark and began studying for a doctorate in the antenna technology laboratory of the Institute for Electromagnetic Systems at the DTU Faculty of Electrical Engineering , which he completed in 1993 with a doctorate .

National Center for Space Science

After completing his doctorate, Wu Ji stayed for a year as a postdoc at Denmark's Technical University until he returned to Beijing on December 28, 1994. Three days later, on December 31, 1994, he took over the management of the Center for Space Science and Applied Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which had just moved into new quarters in Beijing's Zhongguancun high-tech district. The four-story research building was still under construction, his office, equipped with a 286 computer, was in a hut at ground level, and the official apartment allocated to him by the Academy of Sciences was 12 m². His eight-year-old daughter, who grew up in Denmark, was particularly impressed by the latrine in the courtyard, which, as was not uncommon in China at the time, was used by all residents of the house in the absence of private toilets.

From 1996 to 2001, Wu Ji was a visiting scholar in the electrical engineering and computer science faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1997 he was also responsible for the technical aspects of Double Star . In 1996, ESA, together with NASA, made the first attempt to explore the earth's magnetosphere with four satellites operated in a network, the so-called “ cluster ” . The project initially failed due to a malfunction in the Ariane 5 launcher . The Center for Space Science and Applied Research then proposed, together with ESA, to operate two similar satellites in highly elliptical orbits with a much lower perigee than the cluster satellites. The satellites themselves were to be designed and built by China, financed from the 10th  Five-Year Plan (2001-2005). ESA was to contribute eight of 16 payloads, seven of which were duplicates of instruments from the cluster satellites, the eighth being newly developed together with the Center for Space Science. On July 9, 2001, the relevant contract between ESA and the National Space Agency of China was signed.

After the SARS pandemic had developed into a serious problem in early March 2003 , the final phase of the project turned out to be difficult. First, the Europeans took their payloads to a laboratory at the Institute of Physics at Imperial College London, where they checked the Chinese engineers for a week - Britain had no quarantine regulations for travelers from China at the time - and then took them to China. Bodo Gramkow from ESA, Roland Nord and two other Astrium engineers then traveled to Beijing to check the Chinese payloads. On December 30, 2003 the first satellite was launched from the Xichang Cosmodrome , and on July 25, 2004 the second from the Taiyuan Cosmodrome .

Up until that point, China's space travel had consisted only of projects that had an immediate benefit, be it the groundbreaking reconnaissance satellites or the Fengyun weather satellites. The study of the magnetosphere was not just pure basic research: it naturally also promoted an understanding of space weather and thus had a practical use, for example for the operation of civil and military communication and navigation satellites . Nonetheless, Double Star is now seen as China's first space science project.

The lunar program of the People's Republic of China was again very specifically about the search for and mining of mineral resources on the moon. Ouyang Ziyuan , head of the Institute of Geochemistry at the Academy of Sciences and chief scientist of the lunar program from 2004, had geologically oriented the project from the start. From 2003 Wu Ji was project manager for the payloads (有效 载荷 总指挥) of the lunar probes Chang'e-1 , Chang'e-2 and Chang'e-3 . The center for space science not only had to develop the spectrometers etc. required by the geologists , but also systems for power supply and data management of the payloads.

In 2008 the Laboratory for Geomagnetism and Astrophysics and the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (both institutions of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) developed a concept for exploring the ionosphere of Mars with the Yinghuo-1 probe , which was originally launched in October 2009 together with the Russian Mars probe Fobos -Grunt should start. Here Wu Ji was the mission's chief scientist (首席 科学家). The start of the two probes had to be postponed to November 2011 at the last moment, then they could not reach the transfer orbit to Mars and burned up on January 15, 2012 in the Earth's atmosphere. Wu Ji and his colleagues were of course not happy, but since the failure of the on-board computer due to cosmic rays was identified as the most likely cause for the failure of the mission , i.e. not a Chinese problem, the setback at Yinghuo-1 had no long-term effects on Chinese space travel. Today this mission is officially referred to as the “Chinese-Russian joint project to explore Mars” (中俄 联合 探测 火星 计划), whereas the purely Chinese Tianwen-1 mission is called the “First Chinese Mars Exploration Mission” (中国 首次 火星 探测 任务).

On December 28, 2017, Wu Ji handed over the reins of the National Center for Space Science to Wang Chi , who had been its deputy since 2004. Wu has now taken over the chairmanship of the center's science commission (学术 委员会), a kind of supervisory board that has to examine the so-called "evidence" (论证) in the approval process of important projects in order to prevent taxpayers from wasting on unrealistic things.

Political commitment

Since January 2018, Wu Ji, as a representative of the "scientific and technical circles" (als 界) who is not bound by an association, has been a member of the Political Consultative Conference of the Chinese People , with 112 out of 2158 members one of the strongest parliamentary groups in this representation. As director of the National Center for Space Science, Wu Ji was responsible for coordinating the Space Science Priority Program of the Academy of Sciences, through which the State Council of the People's Republic of China uses funds from the five-year plan to finance the construction and operation of research satellites, while prestigious things like the lunar program or the Manned space program will be paid for from the Fund for National Scientific and Technical Large-scale Projects , a fifteen-year program. However, it also takes many years to build sophisticated and funded research satellites. With the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope , for example, it took another sixteen years from admission to the funding program on January 25, 2011 to launch into orbit on June 15, 2017, according to preliminary planning that began in 2000. Therefore, Wu Ji continues in his As a member of the Political Consultative Conference since 2018, as previously as Director of the Center, vehemently advocates that the Academy's research satellites receive longer-term funding and thus more planning security.

In addition to his parliamentary activities, Wu Ji is also deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine "Fernaufklerungstechnologie und -verbindungen" (遥感 技术 与 应用) and editor-in-chief of the "Zeitschrift für Weltraumwissenschaften" (空间 科学 学报). Both journals are published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Works

In addition to numerous articles, Wu Ji also published several books:

  • Space science & technology in China: a roadmap to 2050. Springer , Berlin 2010.
  • 2016 - 2030 年 空间 科学 规划 研究 报告.科学 出版社, 北京 2016.
  • Calling Taikong: A Strategy Report and Study of China's Future Space Science Missions. Springer, Singapore 2017.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g 孙 竞: 吴 季 ： 逐 梦 苍穹 一 苇 以 航. In: edu.people.com.cn. May 18, 2017, accessed June 9, 2020 (Chinese).
  2. ↑ a b c 倪思洁: 吴 季 ： 做 中国 空间 科学 的 “老 菜农”. In: news.sciencenet.cn. March 5, 2018, accessed June 9, 2020 (Chinese).
  3. ↑ a b Science stars of China. In: nature.com. June 20, 2016, accessed June 12, 2020 (Chinese).
  4. ↑ 吴 季: 月球 上 的 联欢会. In: zhuanlan.zhihu.com. April 30, 2020, accessed June 9, 2020 (Chinese).
  5. ↑ a b c 吴 季: 个人 信息. In: zhikuyun.lwinst.com. Retrieved June 9, 2020 (Chinese).
  6. ↑ Wu Ji and AG Roederer: Maximum super angle optimization method for array antenna pattern synthesis. In: orbit.dtu.dk. June 24, 1991, accessed June 9, 2020 .
  7. ↑ In 2000, four replacement satellites were launched with two Soyuz rockets, which then functioned perfectly and should remain in operation until 2022. Luigi Colangeli: Extended life for ESA's science missions. In: sci.esa.int. November 14, 2018, accessed June 10, 2020 .
  8. ↑ 双星 计划. In: nssc.cas.cn. Retrieved June 10, 2020 (Chinese).
  9. ↑ 吴 季: 忆 非典 时期 “双星 计划” 研制 工作 二三事. In: nssc.cas.cn. May 7, 2020, accessed June 10, 2020 (Chinese).
  10. ↑ Crossroads. In: cosmos.esa.int. Retrieved June 10, 2020 .
  11. ^ Double Star Exploration Program (DSP). In: english.nssc.cas.cn. June 6, 2013, accessed June 10, 2020 .
  12. ↑ On July 22, 2019, there was a paradigm shift in the lunar program with a shift in focus to manned activities and lunar low-frequency interferometry . The post of chief scientist was already taken over in 2009 by the astrophysicist Yan Jun .
  13. ^ Lunar Exploration Program. In: english.nssc.cas.cn. June 7, 2013, accessed June 11, 2020 (Chinese).
  14. ↑ 探 月 工程. In: nssc.cas.cn. Retrieved June 11, 2020 (Chinese).
  15. ↑ Phobos-Grunt-Panne: Russian experts blame cosmic rays. In: de.sputniknews.com. October 5, 2015, accessed June 11, 2020 .
  16. ↑ 胡 喆: 中国 首次 火星 探测 任务 命名 为 “天 问 一号”. In: xinhuanet.com. April 24, 2020, accessed June 11, 2020 (Chinese).
  17. ↑ 王 赤. In: nssc.cas.cn. January 11, 2018, accessed June 13, 2020 (Chinese).
  18. ↑ 第七届 学术 委员会. In: nssc.cas.cn. Retrieved June 13, 2020 (Chinese).
  19. ↑ 国家 空间 科学 中心 第七届 学术 委员会 成立. In: nssc.ac.cn. January 16, 2013, accessed June 13, 2020 (Chinese).
  20. ↑ 中国 人民 政治协商会议 第十 三届 全国 委员会 委员 名单. In: gov.cn. January 25, 2018, accessed June 13, 2020 (Chinese).
  21. ↑ 编委会. In: rsta.ac.cn. Retrieved June 13, 2020 (Chinese).
  22. ^ Editorial Committee of the Chinese Journal of Space Science. In: cjss.ac.cn. Retrieved June 13, 2020 .
Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Wu is the family name here, Ji is the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Wu, Ji
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 吴 季 (Chinese); Wú Jì (Pinyin)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chinese communications engineer, director of the National Center for Space Science
DATE OF BIRTH April 19, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Beijing